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The Live Mesh service that Microsoft unveiled Tuesday night is a peek of what Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has been working on all these months.

In its initial incarnation, Live Mesh is mostly a file-sharing and folder-synchronization service, as well as a nice, easy way to access a PC remotely. Down the road though, it's Microsoft's latest attempt to find preeminence in a world in which Microsoft-based devices are just part of the mix.

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Microsoft's Live Maps team just dropped a huge new version of its service in addition to the traffic updates from earlier Thursday.

Live Maps now offers a wealth of new features, including exporting to GPS devices, improved 3D imagery, and one of my personal favorites, MapCruncher integration.

Remember the initial hoo-ha that greeted Netscape in the mid-'90s? The idea being that a new computing platform--in this case the Web browser--would obviate the need to use Microsoft Windows anymore.

That fired imaginations. Instead of writing applications chained to a proprietary operating system, developers would build programs that ran on top of the Internet browser.

Microsoft was dead in the water. Or so a lot of smart people wanted to believe.

Even Netscape's co-founder, Marc Andreessen, got caught up in the hype, famously dismissing Windows as a "poorly debugged set of device drivers." A lot of people felt the same way. If the industry was about to embrace Web-centric computing, Microsoft would be in danger of losing its hegemony over desktop computing.

Of course, if I had a nickel for every time some smarty-pants claimed to have found a surefire Microsoft killer, I wouldn't have to meet deadlines for a living. The optimistic scenario obviously didn't work out the way Andreessen and his fellow travelers hoped it would. But the final coda had yet to be engraved on this story.

Now comes the announcement of a new product from Adobe Systems that intrigues me--as much for what it suggests about Adobe's ambitions as for what it might presage about the future.

I'm simplifying, but Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR, lets you build applications that are kind of the best of both worlds. That is, they'll run in a Web browser or as a standard client app on your desktop (and, presumably, OS-agnostic, too).

Ballmer said the company plans to embrace "disruptive technologies" like Web-based applications that threaten Microsoft's traditional desktop software, which runs locally on a computer hard drive.

"Every piece of software -- the basic core value in the way software gets created -- will change in the next three, five or 10 years," said Ballmer, adding that future software will all factor in some aspect of desktop, Web and server elements.

However, he rejected the idea that the software industry would shift entirely to an Internet delivery model.